Mamie Doud, the last first lady born in the 19th century, was the second of four daughters of businessman John Sheldon Doud and Elivera Carlson Doud, the daughter of Swedish immigrants. Her education ended early, after one year of finishing school. When she was seven, her father had accumulated enough wealth to retire, and the family moved to Denver. They wintered in San Antonio, Texas, and it was there in October 1915 that Mamie met Dwight Eisenhower, a young army lieutenant six years her senior. They were married on July 1, 1916, at the Douds’ Denver home.

Mamie EisenhowerHarris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Mamie and Dwight began married life in military housing in San Antonio, where she learned budgeting and household management—subjects that had not concerned her in her pampered youth. As his career took them all over the world, she ran many different homes, often with little money, and, by the time she moved into the White House, she estimated that she had unpacked at least 27 times.

Tragedy struck the Eisenhowers when their first son, Doud Dwight, died of scarlet fever at age three. A second son, John Sheldon Doud, was born in 1922. About that time Mamie began cutting her hair in a style that later became known as “Mamie bangs.” When her husband’s military assignments separated them during World War II, she wrote him almost daily. His letters to her were later published by their son as Letters to Mamie (1978), in order to quell rumours of a wartime romance between General Eisenhower and his attractive young driver, Kay Summersby.

Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower arriving at Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado, 1950.Fitzsimons Army Med. Ctr. Aurora/U.S. Department of DefenseImmensely popular with crowds and comfortable with important people, Mamie thrived on her duties as first lady, and she was known for gracious entertaining. White House employees reported that she supervised them closely, always on the lookout for lapses. She disliked giving speeches, and in her press conferences she limited herself to listing social activities—as one reporter described it, “tea by inexorable tea.” Determinedly nonpartisan, Mamie published an article in Good Housekeeping in 1952 that she titled, “Vote for My Husband or for Governor Stevenson, but Please Vote.”

The only controversy surrounding Mamie’s tenure as first lady involved her balance problem, which prompted rumours of alcoholism. When Dwight was questioned on the subject in 1952, he replied that he was aware that “the story has gone around” but that she “had not had a drink for something like 18 months.” Historians have generally concluded that, at least during her years in the White House, her balance problem stemmed more from an inner-ear disease than from excessive drinking.

In 1955 Dwight suffered a major heart attack. Despite family concerns about his health, Mamie encouraged him to run for a second term in 1956 because she feared that retirement might be deadly for him.

Mamie Eisenhower.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.After leaving the White House in January 1961, the Eisenhowers moved to a farm they had purchased near Gettysburg, Pa. Mamie survived her husband by 10 years, dying in 1979 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. She is buried beside him in Abilene, Kan.

Although she did not change the job of first lady, Mamie Eisenhower was a favourite of many American women, who imitated her youthful style (known as the “Mamie style”) and what her husband called her “unaffected manner.”